Let’s try a sentence-completion exercise. How would you complete the following sentence, which is an answer to the question, how do you feel about being criticized?
“Well, I’m concerned about that more because it’s really very much an attack on _____.”
What goes in that blank?
If you’re Anthony Fauci, the word in the blank is “science.”
Yes, really. He really said that — “very much an attack on science” — in an interview on The Rachel Maddow Show.
Of course, Fauci had nothing whatever to do with “making” anything, much less a vaccine.
Now, suppose you’re asked about a subject that you claim (rather suddenly, in this case) to be important to you, and you want to say that people are approaching the subject in the wrong way. Here’s how your sentence starts:
“It is being approached now in a very vehement way, in a very distorted way, I believe, by attacking _____.”
What’s the word that follows?
Bingo! You’re right! If you’re Fauci, and the subject is the origin and nature of the covid virus, the word is “me”: “by attacking me.”
With him, the words “science” and “me” have a strange habit of reversing their ordinary locations.
And what if you’re asked what you’ve been doing with yourself during the past year and a half? What do you think your reply will be? Fauci’s reply was: “My job was to make a vaccine . . . That’s what I do. All the other stuff is just a terrible, not-happy type of a distraction.”
Under this regime, countless elderly victims of government policies perished, with no outraged commentary issuing from Dr. Fauci.
Of course, Fauci had nothing whatever to do with “making” anything, much less a vaccine. The vaccines were made by private, profit-making companies, aided by temporary relaxations of the government regulations that usually delay such processes until most of the probable beneficiaries are dead.
Fauci wasn’t making a vaccine. Still he had no time for the “distraction” of trying to discover how the virus started. He was too busy going on TV to denounce the idea that it might have been started by an accident in a lab that, incidentally, he had funded. He was also busy exaggerating — grossly exaggerating — the danger of the virus to the general population; advising people to wear two masks, when he knew that no mask was really useful; and presiding over a regime of social and economic tyranny the likes of which had never been seen before in any allegedly free country. Under this regime, countless elderly victims of government policies perished, with no outraged commentary issuing from Dr. Fauci, who was too busy going on TV to be worshiped as a god.
This is what we now call “science.”
Fauci remains defiant. On June 9, four days after my critique of his “la science, c’est moi” declaration, he was at it again: “A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science, because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science. Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people and there was pushback against me, so if you are trying to, you know, get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science, and anybody that looks at what is going on clearly sees that. You have to be asleep not to see that. That is what is going on. Science and the truth are being attacked.”
“Consistently”? Dr. F is seemingly not consistent from one week to another.
Dr. Cox, though, is consistent: Clear thinker, superlative writer, week after week.
Thank you, Dr. C. You make the world a lot better.